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Archive for the ‘Digg’ Category

Remember Mixx? It was bought out, and the new owners created Chime.in. They did not use the coding. They did not use the URL. I suppose they had the mailing list. I hope they didn’t pay more than $19.97 for it.

Well, the new owners of Digg at least kept the domain. Digg was (OMG – I am already talking in the past tense!), you might recall, the grand-daddy of social sharing websites.

A search for “site:digg.com” in Google reveals “About 14,100,000 results”. That means 14 million pages are indexed, probably a lot more are out there. And all of them say the same thing:

“404”

Yes, Digg can now be found all on a single page. Gone is the community. Gone are categories. Gone are any hot or upcoming or friends or anything, except what can fit on a single page. In one fell swoop, Digg has imploded. I guess this is what happens when a star goes super nova.

You might be able to recoup your user data by filling in a request at http://digg.com/archive, but to what end? What would you do with the data?

No problem. These days you will find me with a lot of other long-time Diggers “Thruzting” away at Thruzt.com. Feel free to join me there. And if you are Canadian, join me also on Zoomit.ca.

1. What is the most amazing social media coup you ever did, or have ever seen done?
2. What is the dumbest social media fail you have ever done, or have ever seen done?

Some of them responded, but not everybody has had either a major disaster or a smash success with social media. Like so many other things, social media is a great communications tool that yields results over time based on hundreds and thousands of interactions, one at a time and incrementally over time. But there were a few coups to report and there were a few lessons to be learned, so here are what they shared with us.

COUP: I’ve never been a big Twitter fan and had always seen it as the equivalent of walking around a park with a megaphone telling random strangers about how wonderful you are. But a year ago, I changed my opinion when I stumbled upon a new business partner by exchanging tweets. In under 140 characters we managed to identify that we had complimentary services and setup a time to discuss partnering. We hit it off and developed a very beneficial partnership.

Lesson: Don’t ignore innocuous tweets. They could result in long term partners!

BOMB: In one of my ventures I actually had a product development team working for an entire year creating a toolbar application that would allow you to share web-based sticky notes through social media (similar to Evernote). The concept was great, but we spent all our energy focusing on the product and not the social media relationships that would be required to give it that initial boost of traffic to spread adoption. Before you know it, we had very few users and we ran out of time and capital. We had to give up and turn our efforts towards other guaranteed-revenue related activities.

Lesson: For a social media product, you’ve got to plan out your marketing strategy early in the product lifecycle and get user input as soon as possible. I won’t share any numbers, but I’m willing to guess that I have the title for one of the more expensive mistakes on this panel!

COUP: One of the best I’ve done so far was an infographic for an ink cartridges company. As you can imagine, ink cartridges is a bland product that very few people, if anyone is actively interested in. This meant that I had to do something out of the ordinary in order to have a hope of getting some traction. So I came up with the idea of printing out the internet, and how much ink and paper it would take to do so. I am an avid documentary geek, with a particular interest in programs like Discovery’s Extreme Engineering where they often use animated graphics to visualise the scale of a project, e.g. this building is equivalent to the height of 10 Statue of Liberty’s, or there’s enough cable in this aircraft to wrap around the world twice. In the end we came up with a really cool looking infographic packed full of factoids about printing the internet.

Shortly after it launched, it went viral. Really viral. Thousands of people tweeted it. It was picked up by lots of the top blogs and hundreds of smaller publishers. Hundreds of thousands of people viewed that infographic. And to the best of my knowledge, it’s still getting links today.

BOMB: I haven’t had a campaign backfire, but like any social marketer I’ve had my fair share of flops. That’s the thing with marketing content – you never really know if it will work. Back at the time when getting promoted on Digg actually mattered, I used to spend a lot of time on there promoting my work. When Digg was at it’s prime, it was probably one of the most exciting times to be a social marketer. You could launch a linkbait, watch it hit the front page, hope your servers will stay up and just wait for the links to roll in. The problem was that you could push something for 24 hours, only for it to be buried at the very last minute just when you thought it was going to be promoted. When that happened, and it happens a lot when you’re promoting content on a commercial website, it s probably the single most demoralising thing about being a social marketer.

COUP: What comes to my mind is an accidental coup that my friend, the owner of a conservative political blog and myself, the webmaster discovered back in 2008 that helped me truly grasp the nature and power of social media. Someone had discovered an interesting blog post that my friend had made (more about this later) and submitted it to StumbleUpon. Of course, I wouldn’t have noticed it but for the sudden influx of visitors the site began receiving in the tens of thousands that continued for about 2 months. Here are some specifics:

StumbleUpon sent around 42,000 visits and listing 46 user reviews.

For the year, StumbleUpon ended up sending three times the traffic that Google sent (the site ranked for the head term, “liberals”).

My friend received offers to appear on a Sirius XM Radio show and a Pajamas Media TV show.

From that day forward, I took StumbleUpon seriously to say the least. But, the funny part is that this social media marketing victory pretty much violated every SEO rule in the book.

The post was not submitted or promoted by anyone affiliated with the site. It spread naturally.

There was no onsite or offsite SEO strategy or measures taken other than the default SEO-friendliness of WordPress.

The post title contained a blatant misspelled word.

The post was only 180 words in length.

The post constituted duplicate content. It turned out to be a meme appearing on many other sites.

BOMB: Let me make it clear that I did not actually do this, but seriously thought about dressing up as Matt Cutts for Halloween.

COUP: My best Social Media coup started with organizing blog contests, entries in the contests usually receive high tweet rates as participants compete with each others to collect more points during the promotion period to win the blog contest, which means a huge exposure for my blog.

BOMB: My big fail and the most silly idea I ever had was when I decided to start an underground twitter exchange network, it’s the worst idea ever.

COUP: My biggest social media coup was working my way up to top domain on Tip’d. I had been blogging for about a year before I really got into using Tip’d. So I had quite a few old posts that I would submit on the weekend and hustle on twitter to get votes, often just needing 4-5 votes to get published to the front page. Being the top domain might be more than just bragging rights, since many users now give me votes without as much begging involved.

BOMB: My biggest social media fail was trying to use Reddit for the first time and getting labeled as a spammer almost immediately. I thought I was submitting my posts, but I’d click on “text” thinking I was leaving a description, but apparently this took out my links and made it look like some very random statements being made by a bot.

BOMB: We had a custom infographic made for Moolanomy. It hit the front page on Digg, back when Digg was cool, and it exploded elsewhere. It ended up with tons of comments, and thousands of views. It was back when infographics were just becoming the big thing, and it really emphasized the importance of being a little ahead of the curve. Plus, it was a somewhat controversial topic (buying vs. renting), and the infographic left out a few things. Actually, it might have been the fact that the graphic left out some things that generated so much buzz and conversation. It was valuable insight that sometimes you can get a lot of a traffic when people see something “wrong.”

COUP: Papa John’s conducted Papa’s Specialty Pizza Challenge the summer of 2010 and the findings were very interesting. Consumers were asked to create and submit recipes for interesting new pizzas.

A panel of qualified judges selected ten semi-finalists based on overall appeal, taste, creativity of the name, and interest of the story. The judges then selected three finalists from the semi-finalists. The top three pizzas were put on the regular menu and finalists had one month to hustle up sales of their pizza creations, each was given $1000 to promote their pizza. The top selling pizza won a cut of the sales up to a maximum of $10,000 plus $480 of Papa John’s pizza each year for 50 years.

Interestingly, the pizza that got the most Facebook “likes” did not win. “Papa John’s Cheesy Chicken Cordon Bleu for Gulf Coast Animals” by Barbara Hyman, started out ahead of the other two pizza contestants and never relinquished that position during the entire month, selling about 108,000 pizzas, or 45% of the contestant pizzas sold.

Papa John’s VP of digital marketing said Hyman’s pizza had two powerful hooks: the Cordon Bleu name was familiar and easy to remember, and her cause was framed as a way to help animals harmed by the BP oil spill, a timely and emotional pull.

Hyman made alliances with other businesses who helped her promote the pizza and pledged to match her charity donation if she won. She said, “People didn’t seem to care about the money I could win, but their interest peaked when I talked about helping wild life covered with oil.”

BOMB: A couple years ago I decided to utilize mommy bloggers to promote a line of rocking horses. I interviewed several and decided on one because she had a big promotion coming up for Mother’s Day weekend and my rocking horse would be the grand prize of all the giveaways going on. Basically contestants could get more entries by tweeting, liking, linking to the website and sharing the contest with friends. At the end the winner of the rocking horse would be chosen by random number.

I sent one rocking horse to the mommy blogger so she could review it; another rocking horse would be sent to the winner of the contest.

Hundreds of people entered the contest and it was interesting to watch the tweets and likes fly, but at the end of the day the site didn’t get many links or as much publicity as I had hoped.

Although I did get some nice things out of the promotion, I also learned some lessons:

Mommy blogger contestants are in it for the free prizes and that’s about it.

Be careful if your product is a much higher value than most of the items that are being promoted on the mommy blogger’s site.

Contests won by random do not tend to engage contestants with the brand during or after the contest is over.

The mommy blogger did link to the site but it was a bit excessive, meaning it was sorta obvious I had asked for links (Google probably ignored most of them).

I know you are curious to know what my biggest coups and bombs were. The reality is that my coups have mostly been in the realm of sustained success, one small step at a time, getting my content and client content to “pop” on social bookmarking websites week after week after week after week. Likewise, my bombs have been incremental, getting banned at Reddit (presumably for submitting some posts that were self-promotional), at the former Propeller (for who knows why?), at the former Shoutwire (for who knows why?), at the Newsvine (possibly for trying to join too many groups at once?) and at Digg (for who knows why?).

But if I was to name one coup and one bomb, it would be the same: creating Zoomit Canada. It was a coup because running one’s own social bookmarking website brings so many social media advantages, making you a bit of a leader and opening plenty of networking doors. It was a bomb because I never did manage to attract anywhere near the kind of attention to make it what it was meant to be (but there is still time for that, hopefully).

I hope you have learned some valuable tips from the coups and bombs we have shared here today. Please feel free to share your own in the comments section below.

So here is a legal conundrum. You’ve been active on a number of social media websites, such as Twitter, FaceBook or Digg. You have amassed a number of friends and followers and built a certain amount of credibility. You leave your job – take a better position elsewhere, move to another city, get laid off or fired – doesn’t matter the reason.

Who owns your Twitter account? Your FaceBook account? Etc.

I thought it was a very straightforward question, too. If it’s in your name, it’s yours. If it’s in the company’s name, it’s the company’s. Period. Or maybe not period. Maybe question mark.

A legal viewpoint has been sought and diligently reported on by Glenn Gabe. The comments, which are not to be taken as legal advice, came from lawyer Mike Pisauro. He covered five scenarios, which I’ll list here but you can go to the original post to read the details.

Grandfathered Twitter Accounts

Twitter Account Already Established, But Employee Has Agreed That Twitter Will Be Part Of His Job

Twitter Accounts Set Up While An Employee Is Working At A Company

The Employee Is The Official Social Media Marketer For The Company

The Employee Is The Official Social Media Marketer And Has Set Up The Account As Part Of The Marketing Effort

For what it’s worth, I think a key point is missing. In whose name is the account set up? Let’s take a scenario where Mary Wilkins is hired to do communications for ACME . and she is told that she needs to tweet nice things about the company, but to set it up in her name, not in the company’s name. There are a number of reasons ACME might want her to tweet in her own name, rather than the company’s.

They might be trying to avoid liability for what an employee might publicly say.

They might want her comments to have an air of objectivity.

They might not want to be held to anything she tweets.

Thjey might want people to connect with a real human being, not an impersonal company.

All these reasons have one common element – they all imply that the company does not want to be associated with the account. They all are purposeful actions to refuse ownership of the account. I have a very hard time believing, legal genius that I am not, that any court would be able to ignore that fact if the real owner — the employee — articulated that argument well.

On the other hand, if the account was set up in the company’s name by the employee, overtly being the ACME account, I cannot imagine for a moment that a court would award ownership of the account to the employee.

The only place I see as being murky is if the account is personal in the person’s name and that person is the official spokesperson for the company and promoted as such. For isnstance if a Twitter account is @MaryWilkins and the ACME logo is used as the background. Situations 4 and 5 above could fall into that class.

Of course, my legal opinion and a dime will buy you a drink at the public water fountain, so if you are a) hiring someone who will be running social media accounts on your behalf or b) being hired by a company wanting you to run its social media accounts, get the prenuptials down in writing ahead of time.

If you include social media marketing as part of your online marketing strategy, give a little thought to your avatar. Actually, give a lot of thought. Overlooked as they are, they can be crucial to your branding strategy.

Avatars are those little images that go beside each post you author at websites like Digg, Twitter, FaceBook, MySpace and even beside comments in this blog. In some places, they are called profile pictures or something like that. But look at all the variety of choices you have…

Why avatars are so crucial is because they are like your online logo on every social media website you participate in. If you Tweet or connect for fun and recreation, who cares? But if marketing and business is important to you, below are 10 guidelines on how to optimize your avatars for maximum affect.

Note that these are “guidelines”, not rules. It might not make sense for you, in your particular situation, to follow all of them, but if you follow none of them, you are probably blowing it big time. Not all the avatars above follow all the guidelines, but they all follow most of them. As you read the list below, let your cursor slide over the images; I have added some notes in the alt and title attributes.

Let’s start with the basics. Don’t leave your avatar blank or go with a default avatar. The image it will leave people with is that you don’t know what you are doing, that you might just be a spammer, that you have something to hide or, perhaps worst of all, no impression – you’ve wasted a chance to brand yourself.

2. Your face is the ideal logo. In social media, people don’t want to interact with a company; they want to interact with a real person. Remember that social media is like a fusion of all the occasions when you might be speaking informally with people – around the water cooler, at trade show receptions, at the pub down the street, at networking meetings. In the real world, nobody wants to speak with a faceless company; they want to speak with a human being. Online people are still people; they want to speak with real people. See what people think of face avatars here.

The previous guideline is one that you might want to break in one very specific situation. If your social media strategy is strictly to broadcast information, you might want your avatar to be your company logo. Very few organizations can get away with this strategy, but some information-rich companies, such as newspapers or radio stations, do this very effectively. Here are avatars from two different media outlets, reflecting very different apporoaches to social media marketing:

4. Make your face pleasant and easy to view. Some people try to get attention with avatars where their face is half showing, on some kind of angle, or contorted. Others pick a cute photo where some object is partially obscuring their faces. Nice pictures for friendship; not ideal for networking.

Remember that your avatar will show very, very small. That means your face really needs to fill the avatar. If it looks like you are far away, people won’t be able to recognize you when the avatar appears in tiny format (like on a Digg submission or even on a tweet). I can think of one Twitter avatar that I always assumed included a baby’s head…until I saw the photo at larger size in another program and I realized it was just the way her hair falls. (Bet she doesn’t know she has a baby!)

6. Also, because avatars show up small, it is ill advised to have too much cluttering up your avatar. Is that a photo of your arms behind your head, or are you picking your nose. Is that a pet, or an oxygen mask or a mutant mushroom in front of your face? Is that a person way back there in the middle of that 20-pixel-wide landscape?

All these guidelines makes for a possibly very dull photo. If everyone follows all these rules, then everyone will look the same and nobody gets branded, right? It does make it more challenging. You can create a distinct background, perhaps a bright color. You can change the color of your face…or post in black-and-white (rare on the Internet) as two of the examples above do. You can become a caricature of yourself or of your expertise (think Statue-of-Liberty for a freedom blogger, thinkBob-the-Builder for a home renovator) – I did say people like to deal with real people, not faceless corporations, but I also said these are guidelines, not rules. You can add a letter to the avatar to represent your username, but be careful that when shrunk it does not look like something strange. Here are examples of three strategies to make avatars stand out:

Smile. Yes, a smile is inviting. People are more likely to add you as a fan or follow you or befriend you if you appear pleasant and inviting. Yes, I know you are above that; basic psychology applies to the other 99.99999% of humanity.

9. Now that you have chosen an avatar, use the same one across all social media platforms where you hold an account. Many people flit from one social media platform to another, and you want to be instantly recognized. I have recognized Twitter friends on Digg, and Digg friends on Sphinn, and Sphinn friends on…exactly. And thanks to Gravatar, I have seen many of my online friends and acquaintances in numerous blog comments. Each time I see a familiar face, that face – and by extension, that person – becomes more familiar. You can see my same avatar on Digg, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Mixx, Sphinn, Zoomit, etc. Interestingly, Lee Oden did a quick Twitter survey just when I was first contemplating this post, so I thought I would share it with you.

Once you pick your avatar, stick with it. I know several folks I really respect who break this rule, so hopefully they won’t hate me (and if they hate me, hopefully they don’t have any voodoo dolls of me kicking around). But every time you change your avatar, you break your branding momentum. From a psychological perspective, your avatar is your logo, and people relate it to you. Imagine if Amazon.com or Toyota or Apple Computers or Target Stores changed their logos several times a year. Exactly. Many people who follow you in social media don’t necessarily remember your name (Yes, I know, your friends do, but many of the people you are trying to reach for marketing purposes don’t) or even your username, but they will know your image, because that is your most powerful representation. They will relate your image to your style/topic of posts; your target market pays attention when it sees your avatar because it’s on their radar. From a more practical perspective, as people flit quickly through recent posts, they will tend to gloss over an unfamiliar avatar. Each time you change your avatar, you lose also their attention.

Let me stress once more that these are just guidelines. If you have good reason to do otherwise, be my guest. When it comes to social media, or any other social situation, there are no hard and fast rules…and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Note that it is a numbered list, and not a “top 10” list. Matt chose a top 9 list, which is just a little offbeat.. Note that there are plenty of illustrations. And the text and images combined are useful – actually demonstrating how to do something – not just silly stuff (although sometimes I like silly stuff, too).

This is a great article by Chris Winfield, one of the top social media marketing specialists and a frequent collaborator with The Happy Guy Marketing: You’ve Made Digg – Now What?

As with so many business decisions, people tend to rush in without a long-range plan. The script is usually the same…

Hey, let’s get the latest gadget.

Cool gadget.

Now what?

I wrote about the same problem in this article about website planning, because so many companies still are rushing out to build a website without a clue what they want that website to do for them.

Chris offers a few good suggestions on what to do about a page that has benefited from a surge in popularity as the result of a home page Digg appearance, including reoptimizing the page, adding calls to action, advertising on it, or redirecting it to another page. I would add that basically you can do pretty much anything you want with the page. For example, you could simply add the page a related survey geared to building leads for your telemarketing operations. Just keep in mind what people visiting it will be expecting. If they come expecting a video on how to carve fruits for a New Year’s Eve party, don’t fill the page with wallpaper remover products.

How would you like to see your bank account password posted to the home page of Digg for all to see and hundreds of bloggers to pick up and post to their blogs as a result? Well, that’s pretty much what happened at Digg yesterday.

If you are not an avid geek newsmonger, you might have missed the riot, the madhouse, the uncontrolled and childish feeding frenzy that gripped Digg yesterday.

After the Digg management team pulled a story (rightly, in my opinion) that revealed a hacking code for new HD-DVDs, the Digg community went haywire. Several times I checked the home page of Digg yesterday, and each time there were stories about no other topic, and pretty well most of them repeated the hacking code.

On the one hand, Digg operates a free and open community, and is not responsible for what people post, especially since those posts are not actually content, but links to content elsewhere on the Web.

On the other hand, if you ran a website where users could post links for others to vote on or comment on, would you not remove a link to a web page of nude Vanessa Fox photos (sorry, inside SEO joke)?

Would you not remove a link to a website on how to create dangerous explosives in your basement?

Would you not remove a link to a site that promoted racial hatred?

Would you not remove a link to a video of a rape?

And what about a link to a page offering the code to illegally hack a company’s product? Digg removed the link. Too late, of course…once the cat’s out of the bag, but still the right thing to do.

In response, Digg was essentially shot down by its own member who wanted Digg to stand up in the name of principle, because they don’t like censorship. Well, neither do I. But this was not a matter of censoring opinion, the way they do in Russia or Iran or at most stockholder meetings. This was censoring the illegal publication of private information, just like your bank account password. I wonder how many people who mobbed Digg took the time to think about that. I suspect the mob might have been more like a twosome if they had.

Sadly, Digg founder Kevin Rose capitulated to the mobs in this post. I think that was the wrong thing to do, and I suppose that much of the mob that brought Digg to its knees yesterday will hate me today. Or perhaps, cooler heads will prevail, and some people will realize that things got just a little out of hand.

I have become fascinated how a website can jump from obscurity to temporary fame and with good hands at its wheel a head start to permanent success just by hitting the front page of Digg.com .

Here is a very comprehensive list of what it takes to get onto the front page of Digg: 50 Tips: How to get the best out of Digg? by Razid Ahmed. Some of it is pretty obvious, like take time to write a really good article. Other tips are less obvious, like make sure your server can handle the extra traffic. Six of the tips relate to crafting a title. They all seem obvious to me, but I know from experience that there is nothing obvious about crafting a title.

The best tips relate to submission, promotion and participation. For instance, get your blog and ezine readers to Digg your content. More good advice: don’t be shy to Digg your own blog posts. On the other hand, don’t submit all your content. Surely you know when you have superb content and when it is just average.

It goes without saying that if you participate in any community and make lots of contacts, you stand a better chance of getting your message heard. But if you don’t have time to build a network, nor the money to rent one (yes, some people do this, much to the disgust of many Digg purists), you can at least do a good job of creating, submitting and promoting your content…and hoping that some of the established networks on Digg will pick up on it.

Razid suggests against forming groups dedicated to Digging each others’ work, but I have to disagree with that one. I would avoid any group that commits you to Digging something you don’t think is superb, but it can come in handy to have, say, 50 other webmasters and bloggers who are willing to look at what you have and Digg it. And it is not too much to ask for you to do the same. The trouble comes if everyone in the group is always Digging all the same content “just because”. That becomes spam and you will get bumped from the community.

And the most important piece of advice… if at first you do not succeed, try, try again. Sooner or later, something you write will get picked up.